Now let's address latency - that entire article only mentioned the word once and it looks like it was by accident.

Latency isn't cool but it is why your Teams/Zoom/whatevs call sounds a bit odd. You are probably used to the weird over-talking episodes you get when a sound stream goes somewhat async. You put up with it but you really should not, with modern gear and connectivity.

A decent quality sound stream consumes roughly 256KBs-1 (yes: 1/4 megabyte per second - not much) but if latency strays away from around 30ms, you'll notice it and when it becomes about a second it will really get on your nerves. To be honest, half a second is quite annoying.

I can easily measure path latency to a random external system with ping to get a base measurement for my internet connection and here it is about 10ms to Quad9. I am on wifi and my connection goes through two switches and a router and a DSL FTTC modem. That leaves at least 20ms (which is luxury) for processing.

That seems to be the theme across all consumer electronics as well. For an average person mid phones are good enough, bargain bin laptops are good enough, almost any TV you can buy today is good enough. People may of course desire higher quality and specific segments will have higher needs, but things being enough may be a problem for tech and infra companies in the next decade.

There are no words to describe how stupid this is.

L4S is on its way, and may finally be the beginning of the end for bufferbloat and congestion, and vendors of mobile devices are in an almost unique position of being able to roll out network stack changes en masse. And just for once, consumer incentives, vendor incentives and network operator incentives all align - and it's incremental, and lacking in incentives for bad actors.

See this blog entry: https://www.ietf.org/blog/banishing-bufferbloat/ for more on L4S and bufferbloat. And this: https://datatracker.ietf.org/meeting/105/materials/slides-10... for a proper technical deep dive.

The development of L4S has been a pincer operation across all levels of the network stack, integrating everything previously understood about latency and congestion in real networks, and one of the most impressive bits of network engineering I've seen in the history of the Internet.

Open-world games such as Cyberpunk 2077 already have hours-long downloads for some users. That's when you load the whole world as one download. Doing it incrementally is worse. Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 can pull 100 to 200 Mb/sec from the asset servers.

They're just flying over the world, without much ground level detail. Metaverse clients go further. My Second Life client, Sharpview, will download 400Mb/s of content, sustained, if you get on a motorcycle and go zooming around Second Life. The content is coming from AWS via Akamai caches, which can deliver content at such rates. If less bandwidth is available, things are blurry, but it still works. The level of asset detail is such that you can stop driving, go into a convenience store, and read the labels on the items.

GTA 6 multiplayer is coming. That's going to need bandwidth.

The Unreal Engine 5 demo, "The Matrix Awakens", is a download of more than a terabyte. That's before decompression.

The CEO of Intel, during the metaverse boom, said that about 1000x more compute and bandwidth was needed to do a Ready Player One / Matrix quality metaverse. It's not that quite that bad.

It's getting pretty reasonable these days, with download speeds reaching 0.5 gbit/sec per link, and latency is acceptable at ~20ms.

The main challenge is the upload speed; pretty much all the ISPs allocate much more spectrum for download rather than upload. If we could improve one thing with future wireless tech, I think upload would be a great candidate.

I can grant that a typical usage of wireless bandwidth doesn't require more than 10Mbps. So, what does "even faster buy you"?

The answer is actually pretty simple, at any given frequency you have a limited amount of data that can be transmitted. The more people you have chatting to a tower, the less available bandwidth there is. By having a transmission standard with theoretical capacities in the GB or 10GB, or more you make it so you can service 10, 100, 1000 more customers their 10Mbps content. It makes it cheaper for the carrier to roll out and gives a better experience for the end users.

Now, it's possible that that raw GB/s with unobstructed LoS is the underlying optimization metric driving these standards, but I would assume it's something different (e.g. tower capex per connected user).

What I find fascinating is that in a lot of situations mobile phones are now way faster than wired internet for lots of people. My parents never upgraded their home internet despite there being fire available. They have 80MBit via DSL. Their phones however due to regular upgrades now have unlimited 5G and are almost 10 times as fast as their home internet.

10G internet doesn't make your streaming better, but downloads the latest game much faster. It makes for much less painful transfer of a VM image from a remote datacenter to a local machine.

Which is good and bad. The good part is that it makes it easier for the ISPs to provide -- most people won't be filling that 10G pipe, so you can offer 10G without it raising bandwidth usage much at all. You're just making remote workers really happy when they have to download a terabyte of data on a single, very rare occasion instead of it taking all day.

The bad part is that this comfort is harder to justify. Providing 10G to make life more comfortable the 1% of the time it comes into play still costs money.

> Consider a very brief history of airspeed in commercial air travel. Passenger aircraft today fly at around 900 kilometers per hour—and have continued to traverse the skies at the same airspeed range for the past five decades. Although supersonic passenger aircraft found a niche from the 1970s through the early 2000s with the Concorde, commercial supersonic transport is no longer available for the mainstream consumer marketplace today.

OK, "Bad Analogy Award of the Year" for that one. Traveling at supersonic speeds had some fundamental problems, primarily being that the energy required to travel at those speeds is so much more than for subsonic aircraft, and thus the price was much higher for supersonic travel, and the problem of sonic booms meant they were forbidden to travel over land. When the Concorde was in service, London to NYC flights were 10-20x more expensive on the Concorde compared to economy class on a conventional jet, meaning the ~4 hours saved flight time was only worth it for the richest (and folks just seeking the novelty of it). There are plenty of people that would still LOVE to fly the Concorde if the price were much cheaper.

That is, the fundamental variable cost of supersonic travel is much higher than for conventional jets (though that may be changing - I saw that pg posted recently that Boom has found a way to get rid of the sonic boom reaching the ground over land), while that's not true for next gen mobile tech, where it's primarily just the upfront investment cost that needs to be recouped.

There are plenty things that *could* require more bandwidth than video, but it's not clear that a large number of people want to use any of them.

Lower frequencies have the advantage of longer distances and permeating through obstructions better. I suppose limited bandwidth and considerations of the number of devices coexisting is a limiting factor.

“Hey, this isn’t actually supposed to be used to get work done. Keep doing simple phone stuff!“

Other factors, such as jitter, transmission delay, queuing delay, etc., also impact quality. However, if the delay occurs mid-transmission (e.g., due to network congestion or routing inefficiencies), there’s little that can be done beyond optimizing at the endpoints.

[1] https://www.wikiwand.com/en/articles/Latency_(audio)#Telepho...

For example, at the last investor day that AT&T held, they indicated [0:pdf] that their growth plans are in broadband fiber, not building more 5G capacity to serve a surge in traffic. Reading their charts and knowing how AT&T traditionally worked, I believe that they are going to try to cut the expense of running the 5G network via various optimizations and redirect capital heavily to go after the fiber broadband market instead, using convergence (ahem: price bundling) to win subscribers.

(I bet it really stuck in their craw that Comcast mastered the bundle so well that they even built a successful MVNO on the back of their xfinity customer base and parked their tanks on AT&Ts lawn while the latter was futzing about with HBO.)

However, bundling is a price compression game, not an ARPU growth game. If you start at $100 a month and then begin chipping away with autopay discounts, mobile convergence, free visa gift cards and all that nonsense, pretty soon you are selling broadband for $35 a month and can't make it work except with truly cruddy service, which leads to high churn rates. So we'll see how this turns out.

[0:pdf] https://investors.att.com/~/media/Files/A/ATT-IR-V2/reports-...

So you want me to trade my horrible 100mbit line with ok latency for anything between 10 and 120mbit depending on the time of day with a latency if over 50ms guaranteed. And you also get a CGNAT IP and thus no incoming connections because who needs ipv6!

https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/nokia-ceo-ste...

Perhaps this has something to do with limited mobile bandwidth?

Now imagine we add more bandwidth: what would happen to Comcast and other fiber monopolists if people started replacing fiber with 5G?

Once users stop demanding higher speeds, you can still get a lot more growth by giving them higher data caps or even unlimited plans.

This will make 5G home routers a very attractive option, particularly when the only other options you have available are cable and/or DSL.

I think wireless providers competing in the same playing field as traditional ISPs will turn out to be an extremely good thing for consumers.

Currently 5G doesn't even meet their very own 3 objectives namely:

1) Enhanced Mobile Broadband (eMBB) - eMBB, 2) Massive Machine Type Communication (mMTC) - mMTC, 3) Ultra-Reliable Low Latency Communication (URLLC) - URLLC

The article is just focusing on the first part that's arguably can be met by prior standard the 4G LTE+ if it's only about 1 Gbps bandwidth of the 5G lower range microwave frequency bands or FR1.

For most parts of the world, 5G higher range millimeter waves (mmWave) band or FR2 are not being widely deployed and implemented that can delivered bandwidth much higher than 1 Gbps but then again the wireless transmission ranges and distances are severely limited for mmWave compared to microwave or RF.

One of the notable efforts by 3GPP (5G standards consortium) for objectives part 2 and 3 is the DECT NR+ [1]. It's the first non-cellular 5G standard that can support local mesh wireless networks but it's availability is very limited now although no base stations modifications are required for its usages since it's non-cellular and the backhaul to base stations can be performed by the existing 5G connectivity. I'd imagined that it will be available inside most phones now since the standard already out for several years but it seems only Nordic is interested in the new standard.

The upcoming 6G standards probably need to carry on and focusing on the 2 and 3 objectives of 5G even more so, since it's expected machine to machine (M2M) will surpass the conventional human-to-human (H2H) and even the new (H2M) with the rise of IoT and AI based system for example intelligent transports of (vehicle-to-everything) V2X systems.

[1] DECT NR+: A technical dive into non-cellular 5G (30 comments):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39905644

Hard pass.

5G is far from ubiquitous as it. Though how would we even know? I feel like my phone is always lying about what type of network it's connecting to and carrier shave the truth with shit like "5Ge" and the like.

I have not, ever, really thought "Yeah, my phone's internet is perfect as-in". I have low-signal areas of my house, if the power goes out the towers are sometimes unusable due to the increased load, etc. I do everything in my power to never use cellular because I find incredibly frustrating and unreliable.

Cell service has literally unlimited headroom to improve (technologically and business use-cases). Maybe we need more 5G and that would fix the problems and we don't need 6G or maybe this article is a gift to fat and lazy telecoms who are masters at "coasting" and "only doing maintenance".

Time to make it cheap!

With my Pixel 8 and 5G SA activated (Telefonica Germany) everything is back to normal.

Nobody would shrug at being able to fly 2x faster. The reason it stopped is because it made lots of noise and was expensive. Not because it was not needed.

I think you'd be hard pressed to find anyone who would not want faster flights if it could be done at reasonable cost.

Complete BS. This misses the critical and common issue of user contention with 4G, which is the main relief 5G brings.

If all you do is compare peak throughput on paper you will miss the real world performance issues. In reality you will never see "good" 4G speeds, there just isn't enough bandwidth to go around in practice due to the lower frequency bands it operates in.

I've got both a 4G and 5G LTE router, both are Cat20 which means in theory can operate at up to 2 Gbit/s. Yet in practice, with any of the carriers in the UK the 4G modem will scape 40 Mbit/s at best in the wee hours, and drop as low as 3 Mbit/s at peak time. The 5G one will give me 600 Mbits all day long... because there is enough bandwidth to go around for all users, this is the key difference.

IOW: Apps could definitely use high bandwidth & low latency networking (think AI acceleration, remote storage, volumetric telepresence etc) if we had it reliably, but our due to wireless transition apps are adopted to stagnating speeds.

This is a terrible example.

If supersonic mass travel could be provided safely and cheaply, demand would be bonkers.

If I could get to Tokyo in an hour for $50, I would visit every weekend.

Overall, the article is sound.

But what a terrible example of demand not filling supply.

If I had a terabit per second, indeed I probably wouldn't use it.

But you can not make travel fast enough.